Unlocking the Secrets of Regular (but Very Rich) Americans

Ryan D'Agostino wanted to know how the extremely wealthy got that way. So he asked. In this exclusive excerpt from his new book, Rich Like Them, the Esquire articles editor explains his door-to-door search across America's richest neighborhoods — and one Forrest Gump-ian success story.

Most Read

The woman stared at me, eyebrows raised, waiting. I was standing in the airy living room of her waterfront home, a stranger who had knocked on the door. In the driveway: an Audi A6. In the kitchen: golden oak cabinets, tooth-white beams over-head, and tawny hardwood underfoot, all absorbing the cold morning sunlight that skipped off the water and through the picture windows, as if this room was where the sun belonged. In my hand: a $1.79 steno notebook.

This was Westport, one of the wealthiest bedroom communities along what's known as Connecticut's Gold Coast, for the prevalence of extremely rich people and its location on the gentle shore of Long Island Sound. It is, in fact, the forty-third richest ZIP code in the United States, as measured by benchmarks including income, net worth, and home value. Paul Newman, Martha Stewart, Michael Douglas, Harvey Weinstein, and Michael Bolton have all lived there or still do. Presidential candidates swing through town for fund-raisers. The residents enjoy exclusive access to a pristine beach, a marina, and a golf course. On every parcel of waterfront property sits a home whose appraised value would cause many sane Americans to weep in bewilderment. Very nice place, Westport.

She looked me up, then down. She was around fifty, slim and blonde with clamshell-blue eyes; she wore a white cable-knit sweater. The morning news from CNN murmured almost inaudibly from a large flat-screen television in the corner. She clutched a coffee mug with both hands and leaned against the kitchen counter.

"Okay," she said. "What do you want to know?"

It was an appropriate question. There I was in this nice lady's living room, a writer who had come in from the cold. Through the bay window, I saw, at the end of a long deck that was built out over her beach like a boardwalk, the brackish waters of Saugatuck Bay sloshing around in a winter wind that whipped the tops of waves into foam. The sun bounced off the water, glamour-lighting the whole scene.

I was going door to door, and once I was in I asked people what I yearned to know: how they came to be rich enough to live in such magnificent houses. More to the point, I was eager to understand how people build fortunes in America. How do they approach big decisions in their lives? In their careers and in their finances? How do they overcome missteps? How do they save, spend, enjoy, invest? How do they get here?

My wife and I like to take walks, especially when we're in a new town — for a wedding, maybe, or on vacation. Whenever we wander into a neighborhood of bigger, more beautiful homes on sprawling lots, invariably one of us asks, thinking out loud, only half serious, "Why don't we get to live there? And who does?" In Charleston, South Carolina, we once walked along the Battery, which cuts between the mighty antebellum mansions and the harbor. In Grafton, Vermont, we ogled farmhouses whose yards backed up to untamed woods. And in Seattle, we took a ride in a seaplane, nudging each other at the sprawling compounds that stud the islands of Puget Sound. We try not to point or drool. We don't begrudge the unseen nabobs who live in these tastefully landscaped homes. We dream. We think, Wouldn't that be fun? We're genuinely curious how they did it. We wonder if there's anything we could be doing better, smarter. We joke about knocking on doors, seeing what advice the home owners have, what they might tell us over a drink.

So, I decided to do just that — to introduce myself to dozens of people, all over the country. My day trip to Westport represented the first test of a hypothesis I hoped would teach me the secrets of wealth: if I knocked on enough doors in enough preposterously rich enclaves, I might gather enough insight and guidance to help me — and you, and anyone else who reads this — understand how to get rich; rich like them. Simple as that.

My spiel: In my pitch, which started out extemporaneous but became polished over time, I said I was a journalist working on a story about the people who live in whatever town I happened to be visiting. I said I was traveling to affluent ZIP codes, just like this one, across the country, showing up unannounced, and walking door-to-door in search of people to interview.

My whole premise was that people who live in large, expensive houses must know something about making money. This is a generalization, of course. Once in a while, sure, a door opened and some rich guy gave me a few minutes of his time but had no real wisdom to share. Not everyone who makes $1.6 million a year is Lao-tzu. I had my trials out there, no question. Demoralizing stretches of gray suburban asphalt lined with empty, unfriendly houses. Then someone would finally open a door and offer a few bland aphorisms, not even trying. Or, worse, someone would bristle at my question and close the door quickly and not a little rudely, leaving me chastened as I retreated down the front walk, sure they were peering out at me through the window like I was some kind of proselytizer.

So, what did I learn on my travels?

Generally, I found that there is no secret, fail-safe recipe for success — but, then, I already knew that, and so did you. I learned how to make smart decisions, how to work with people, how to work alone. I got tips on running a business, buying and selling land, saving and spending. Mostly, I learned how to think. The people I met inspired me. And I think they will inspire you.

Here is what else I learned about the people who get to live in dream houses: The people who get to live in dream houses are just people. Like you. The ones I met came from blue-collar backgrounds or moneyed backgrounds or somewhere in between.

They were proud, modest, eager to talk, reticent, skeptical, flattered, patient. Like you, maybe. They were cooking dinner, watching television, rushing to go pick up the kids, relaxing in the backyard, working — doing the things people do on Fridays and Saturdays, the days I did my walking; doing the things we all do.

Most of the people who spoke to me seemed to have charged through life, operating on the theory that infinite possibility exists in the unknown. That's why they bothered to talk to me at all, I think. Some guy shows up at your door, tells you he's writing a book about success, and wants to pick your brain. Why do you agree to tell him your story? Why do you agree to tell him anything? There is no real, obvious gain in it for you — a person trying to enjoy a Saturday afternoon. Why do it? Why share your personal history, your beliefs, the maxims about money and hard work that you'll pass along to your children?

Why? Two reasons: First, because maybe you're a little proud of your accomplishments, and it's nice to be asked about them. Second, you talk to the writer because you never know where it might lead.

In telling the stories of the dozens of people I coaxed to the front door, I have made some effort to provide context and to tease out the lessons, but I also leave it to you to extract whatever guidance or wisdom you see — whatever speaks to you — and to be inspired by these people in your own way. They inspired me, each and every one of them. They are good people to listen to. I know. I've seen their houses.

A college friend of mine in Lake Forest, Illinois, had recommended I look for a particular house when I was in town. "Knock on Frank's door," his parents said. "He's got a great story. He got lucky, hit it big." They didn't tell me what Frank's story was.

I had been to Lake Forest more than a decade earlier, to visit the same friend. I remember driving to the center of town for a sandwich and parking in front of a Ferrari dealership. The sandwich had aioli on it, not mayo, which at the time seemed fancy to me. In 2007, the median household income in Lake Forest was $164,906, and the average value of a home was $929,715. It ranked number thirty on my list of the hundred richest ZIP codes.

It was hard to believe that Frank Heurich's mansion once served as the garage for another house. He had obviously added on, and now his white house stood tall and broad. On the other side of an endless lawn that could accommodate multiple football games simultaneously, Lake Michigan rippled, a thin watercolor stripe above the green expanse. I sat in a chair that was like a pile of cotton balls. Heurich seemed to wonder from the outset what was so interesting about him, and I had to ask a lot of questions. He looked vaguely like Dick Cheney, without the crooked smirk, and wore a faded purple Northwestern University sweatshirt and jeans.

"I started a company called Gregor Jonsson Shrimp Peeling Systems with a guy who had a retail fish business in Highland Park," he said flatly. "We make and lease machines to peel and deliver shrimp."

I stared at him, unmoving, for probably too long a moment. I glanced outside at the huge lawn and the shimmering lake beyond. I looked back at Frank Heurich.

"Shrimp peeling?" I asked.

"Yeah."

After another moment, I said something like, "Wow." And then, "What was the other guy's name, who had the fish business?"

Heurich stared at me.

"Gregor Jonsson."

"Right," I said.

Jonsson, a family friend, was much older than Heurich. At his fish store, Jonsson and his small staff filleted the fish themselves and peeled shrimp by hand — which at the time was the only option. One day, an employee stood hunched over the shrimp table, peeling away, and muttered, "They should make a machine to do this."

It was one of those lightbulb moments. Jonsson took a paper clip, grabbed a shrimp by the swimmerets — those are the little legs — and he held it in place somehow with the paper clip, cut it down the back with scissors, then got the veins out with an ice pick. He worked for the next fourteen years on making a machine that could do the same thing.

Meanwhile, Heurich had been off getting an undergraduate business degree with a concentration in marketing from the University of Illinois ("It was cheap," he said) and an MBA from the University of Chicago. By the time Heurich finished school, Jonsson had almost perfected his shrimp-peeling machine, and he needed a business-minded partner, someone better at accounting, hiring, and generally turning a profit. He called Heurich.

The pair came up with an unusual business model: they wouldn't sell the machines, they would lease them. The company assumes 100 percent of the risk, but the machines generate income for as long as they are operational. "Gregor just thought we could make more money that way," Heurich said. "So we do a month-to-month lease." For more than fifty years now, his company has been collecting money off month-to-month leases. Other companies have tried to replicate Gregor Jonsson's product, but none have matched it. One key advantage, which no one has been able to mimic, is that Heurich's machines do not require the shrimp to be of uniform size. "There's another company that does what we do, but they squeeze the shrimp and pinch the meat out," Heurich said. "We do it totally differently. With us, size differences from shrimp to shrimp are not an issue. We can do shrimp of all different sizes. We can peel it completely or leave the tail on. We can butterfly it, whatever." All I could think of at that moment was Bubba in Forrest Gump. "We have patents, but our protection is mostly that it's very expensive machinery to produce. It would be difficult for someone to do what we do." (The company has a terrific short video on its Web site, www.jonsson.com, that shows how the machines work.)

I pressed Heurich about the month-to-month lease model. It fascinated me. These machines were expensive to build and maintain, and I assumed that the company could command a high price by selling them to seafood distributors and restaurants. But Heurich said that not only was the leasing model more profitable (and who was I to argue, sitting in his giant house?), customers liked it better.

"That business model makes sense for us because we have a very small, niche market, and by leasing and replacing the machines on a schedule, we can offer the best-quality products and service," he said. "When we started out, the machines were not always perfect, and by leasing them, we could afford to keep updating and improving them and replacing them with new ones. The way our leasing program works, there's no long-term obligation for the customer. We take all the risk. This has several advantages: The first is that we don't need as big a sales effort, which is expensive to have. And we don't have any of the legal expenses that you need to collect on defaults and things like that. We're a very small company, so we need to operate efficiently. By assuming all the risk, we're announcing that we have confidence in our product and that we can keep the customer happy."

After a moment, he added, "Usually it works out. It doesn't always work out. But that's the nature of risk. And what's risk? What's the worst that could happen? I'll still be alive."

Growing up, Heurich learned about customer service by working in his father's jewelry store. There he learned that for a small business, serving people is more important than any other task — research, development, accounting, hiring, marketing, anything.

"I started working for my father when I was about twelve. That experience — taking care of customers — made me realize where the money comes from. It comes from the customers! That was very valuable for me," he said. Heurich also had an aptitude for working with his hands, which he improved by repairing clocks and jewelry clasps. He enjoyed learning about engineering and mechanics. So, he had an interest in accounting and he liked working with his hands — these became the foundation for his career running a business that makes machines, he said, and once he found a job that combined his loves, he stuck to it.

"I guess it's just my personality. I have this curiosity that has served me quite well, I think. Some people want to know about one small area. They want to be specialists. But I have curiosity in other areas. I want to know about all areas of the business," he said.

Heurich was a model of resoluteness, but I wondered if he enjoyed his work — particularly after doing the same thing for so many years. When I asked him if he ever thought about branching out or adding new machines to the product line, if even just to bust up the routine, he said, in the pleasant, matter-of-fact way that midwesterners state what seems obvious to them, "We haven't expanded very far because we felt there would always be opportunity in our business. Shrimp is a huge market. So we stayed in the area of what we thought we knew best. We do have a new product we're bringing out soon, which is for working with cold-water shrimp." He paused for a moment before shrugging and adding, "But it's still shrimp."

Did he love his job, I asked? "I have four kids, and all of them and their spouses are working for me. Seven out of the twenty employees are family," he said. "We're doing very well — we just moved to a new facility that's twice as big as our old space, where we had been for forty-five years. And this company suits my personality. I love food, I have mechanical aptitude, I have business and selling aptitude. And I love shrimp. It's low in fat, it's healthy, it can't live in polluted waters. I love it. As long as it's not overcooked."

Frank Heurich has plugged away, running his business the best way he knows how, for more than five decades. I'm sure Gregor Jonsson, Inc., Shrimp Peeling Systems has taken its share of hits over the years — disappointing quarters, manufacturing glitches, client disputes, that kind of thing — but listening to Heurich, you come away with the impression that his stewardship has kept the company running about as smoothly as a small business can. He is pleased to be able to use both his MBA and his hands, and that's all the satisfaction he needs. He hasn't tried to take off in pursuit of dramatic growth at the expense of maintaining his core business — didn't try to invent an oyster-shucking machine or an automatic lobster desheller — and in remaining steadfast, he has achieved the long, slow, steady ascension to — well, to the mansion on Lake Michigan.